One Year After Chemist's Murder, a Stalled Inquiry Angers Relatives

Geetha Angara left her lab at a water treatment plant in Totowa, N.J., about 10:15 a.m. on Feb. 8, 2005, then stopped by another lab briefly before heading to the plant's isolated concrete basement to calibrate the instruments that monitor the water supply for 800,000 customers.

No one at the plant recalled seeing her after that. She failed to show up to take her daughter to a basketball game that afternoon. She still had not made it to her Holmdel home by the time her husband returned from work about 6:15 p.m. After an unsuccessful search of the plant, the local police were called at 11:20 p.m. By then, she had been missing for 13 hours.

What the police and plant officials did not know was that she was already dead, lying at the bottom of a 35-foot-deep tank of purified water under the plant's basement. The police believe that someone other than Dr. Angara had pried open the tank's 50-pound hatch. An autopsy later showed that she had been choked until she lost consciousness, then thrown into the 36-degree water, where she drowned. Shards of a beaker were found nearby.

By the time Dr. Angara's body was found the next afternoon, searchers had already combed through the basement, disrupting evidence at the crime scene. The water in the tank washed away any DNA evidence that might have been found on her body.

Now, a year after her death, her murder remains unsolved and investigators say that they are at an impasse. No one has worked on the case full time since the spring. Out of 30 murders last year in Passaic County, it is one of just two that the authorities have not solved.

James F. Avigliano, the Passaic prosecutor, said recently that his detectives believed that Dr. Angara was killed in "an altercation that got out of hand, one of these spur-of-the-moment things."

But he added, "Absent a motive, absent any evidence, absent any witnesses, it is a very, very difficult case to solve."

Because of the restricted access at the plant, which is operated by the Passaic Valley Water Commission, investigators are nearly certain that one of the plant's 85 employees at the time killed Dr. Angara. They had focused their investigation on eight "people of interest" and then came up with three "people of real interest," according to the authorities.

One of those three had worked for Dr. Angara, knew she had been planning to go to the basement and reported finding pieces of a beaker to his supervisor the day she disappeared, the police said. All three were asked to take a lie detector test. One passed and one refused, while the results for the third were inconclusive, according to Detective Lt. James Wood of the Passaic County prosecutor's office.

"Unless there is some new bit of information or evidence that comes to light, we have exhausted every possible way we can go on this case," Lt. Wood said.

Dr. Angara, who was 43, was married and had three children, now ages 10, 14 and 20. She was a senior chemist at the plant, where she had worked for 12 years. She had earned her Ph.D. in organic chemistry at New York University.

"This is a happy nest, and that nest was removed, destroyed," said her husband, Jaya Angara, 51, a banker. He added that he was angry and frustrated with the lack of progress by the police.

Several of Dr. Angara's co-workers, who would speak only if granted anonymity because they still work at the plant, described Dr. Angara as bright and cheerful. But one of them also said that some of her co-workers -- who he said owed their jobs to politics -- may have resented her and kept her from being promoted because they were jealous of her Ph.D. and her expertise. "A lot of people feel threatened all the time, afraid she may take their job," the worker said.

Dr. Angara's husband and one of her sisters, Saranya Rao, said that the week before Dr. Angara was killed, she was out sick, and the plant had problems with a slight pink discoloration in the water. It was fixed, but not according to the protocol at the plant. After Dr. Angara returned, she was asked to retrain people on how to handle such problems. Her relatives wondered whether that had led to her killing.

The family had also raised the possibility that her death was connected to the failure last August of the new plant's ozone system to purify the water. Prosecutors said that this angle had not proved fruitful; they noted that the system had failed because of inadequate welding.

Mr. Angara had also questioned why a sensor in the tank was broken and did not register the disturbance when she was thrown in. This has led him to believe, he said, that "there are other people helping this killer."

But John F. Latoracca, the county's chief assistant prosecutor, said the sensor had not been tampered with, and may not have been sensitive enough to register such a disturbance. Investigators also looked into the issue of the pinkish water and concluded it was not related to the murder, he said. They believe it is more likely that her killer acted alone.

The family's lawyer, John Leonard, said he is in the process of asking the New Jersey attorney general and the United States attorney to join the investigation. He also said he was exploring the possibility of filing a civil lawsuit for wrongful death.

Mr. Avigliano, the prosecutor, said he was open to having other law enforcement agencies look into the case. "If anyone feels that some agency out there can do a better job than the homicide detectives in my office, they can feel free to come in here," he said.

A year after Dr. Angara's death, some of her former co-workers said morale was low at the plant. "To know somebody in the plant did something like this, of course it's an eerie feeling," said one.

The worker also said the killing raised serious questions about security at the plant, which recently signed a $650,000 contract for armed guards to patrol inside and outside the facility 24 hours a day.

"If somebody could go and do one of the worst crimes you could do, taking a person's life, of course, who knows what they could do to a water supply," he said.

For investigators, about all that is left to do is speculate.

"You have longstanding, deep-seated resentment on one end of the spectrum, or the purely spontaneous, where she saw somebody doing something and confronted them, that kind of thing," said Mr. Latoracca, the assistant prosecutor.